I am the Director of IT for a small/medium sized marketing company, where I personally write the code that runs our applications.
I'm sure I'm not the only code monkey who shudders at the implications of this statement.
Some of us coders are well-nigh insufferable already, because they think they're Superprogrammer and can leap tall mainframes in a single bounds check. The problem comes when those types find themselves in management -- but won't let go of the programming reins. Now, the IT guy with a new idea doesn't just have to worry about it getting shot down by the hotshot who knows everything -- he has to worry about whether his *career* will get shot down by Mr. Hotshot Coder-Manager.
There's a great chance that the article poster isn't like that. But I'm worried, because Ask Slashdot isn't who he should be asking... he should be asking the coders he manages how to design and/or restructure the database. The fact that he's asking Slashdot tells me that he's not comfortable letting someone else do the work, possibly because he's Superprogrammer and always knows what's best.
But in case that's not the situation -- maybe he's in a company that simply grew faster than its staffing could handle -- I'll answer the question. He wants a good book to explain general database design techniques. My answer: buy a good book on management techniques, because *that* is your job. Let the people you manage come up with a database design, because that is *their* job.
"The well has pumped millions of gallons (liters) of oil into the Gulf"
uh... one of those things is not like the other... I question the validity of any site that thinks gallons and liters are interchangable
You would prefer, then, that the article said "The well has pumped millions of gallons (3,785,411.78's of liters) of oil into the Gulf"? Perhaps a review of the concept of False Precision is in order. "A guard at a museum says a dinosaur skeleton is 70 million and six years old. He reasons that it was 70 million years old when he started working there six years ago."
This paragraph from TFA has the most salient information:
Pohl and his team have a come up with a smaller number by using a cousin of the electron, known as the muon. Muons are about 200 times heavier than electrons, making them more sensitive to the proton's size. To measure the proton radius using the muon, Pohl and his colleagues fired muons from a particle accelerator at a cloud of hydrogen. Hydrogen nuclei each consist of a single proton, orbited by an electron. Sometimes a muon replaces an electron and orbits around a proton. Using lasers, the team measured relevant muonic energy levels with extremely high accuracy and found that the proton was around 4% smaller than previously thought.
4% sure does seem significant. But more interesting is that the measurement is thought to be much more precise because of the method of measurement. Doesn't it seem more likely that it's just not possible to get an accurate measurement with the electron -- like measuring a grape with a yardstick instead of a micrometer?
And of course, there's that stupid cat-in-a-box thing... you can't measure something without affecting it, so maybe muons interact in some strange (lol) way with protons that doesn't happen (or happens differently) with electrons. But as a non-physicist, even throwing those terms out there puts me far outside my league.
Of course, these more prosaic explanations don't lead to nearly as many cool sci-fi plot threads. FTL drive powered by a process that squeezes protons to black hole density, perhaps? That would be awesome. Or, perhaps the expansion of the universe is actually reducing the size of subatomic particles -- so in a few billion years, all matter will simply wink out of existence. Or, there's a time dilation effect as well, so that time drags longer and longer, especially on Mondays.
I usually explain concrete vs. asphalt with a reverse-car analogy. Concrete is digital; asphalt is analog.
With a concrete surface, you have two states: good or bad. In the 1 (good) state, it's smooth and durable. In the 0 (bad) state, it crumbles away to nothing.
Asphalt, though, has many values: smooth and flat, a bit bumpy, kinda rutted, cracked, nearly-gravel, and "wasn't there a paved road here once?" The transition between states is gradual, unlike concrete where one day you're driving just fine, and after the ice storm your lug nuts are flying off.
Which surface is "better" depends on your perception. After all, we got rid of asphalt-like analog TV (some stations come in clearer than others) to concreteish digital TV (you either have a station or you don't), and called that "progress".
The submitter doesn't know what to do with his 802.11b networking equipment, and says it's outdated? What the hell should I do, then, with my closet full of 802.11a adapters?
Seriously -- I got some Intel equipment for $5 a piece, originally $300+, and used it to build my first wireless network. It was a real Frankenstein's Monster of a setup, too: a dialup connection, a Coyote Linux box, and this crazy grey box that was so inefficient, it had a cooling fan built in. The thing didn't even have any sort of basic wired router/switch capability. It sat on top of the fridge for a couple of years... until we went to move it and saw that the warmth had turned it into a magnet for roaches. You've heard of a Roach Motel? This was a high-rise Roach Health Spa. That particular 802.11a adapter went straight into the burn bin (plastic and all).
Sadly, though, I still had three more units. At $5 each, I'd bought four.
To answer my own question, though, of what to do with them... I dropped them off before business hours at a local PC repair shop last week, along with a half-dozen old PCs that the kids were tired of tripping over. I hope they'll be able to put them to good use. After all, who's going to be able to eavesdrop on an 802.11a wireless connection?
Worth it just for the shortened answering machine message. Say sayonara to the Long Winded Lady.
Also, I love the text messages with the (attempted) transcription of the incoming message. Even when it's mangled, it tells me whether my ex is calling to tell me something important, or if she's just going to tell me the latest gossip about people I'm not related to any more (her, for example).
And the failed transcriptions are sometimes hilarious. My son likes to call up and leave a message just to see what Google thinks he said. A recent example: "Hey Dad and I found Steakhouse on. So either holler okay, but in the day picking up in." For great justice!
The same thing can pretty much be said about the whole internet to be fair.
Can be? More like *has* been said, and *continues* to be said. It started with personal web pages -- my first Geocities page proclaimed "I love my wife and kids!", as though that were something unique in the world. But I also had a page of cool background wallpapers that I'd found, back when that was a novel concept... and a little outfit called Yahoo! found my "Wallpaper Heaven" page and suddenly it was getting hundreds of hits a day.
Blogs, too -- 90% useless, but the remaining 10% are either essential to my job in IT, or just interesting. Fortunately, Google does a pretty good job of figuring out which ones are worth reading, just by looking at who's linking to them.
I have to agree with the other posters... if Twitter is achieving anywhere near 20% signal-to-noise, it's a resounding success. And as the search tools mature, it'll only get better. Or, to misquote Douglas Adams, it coul eventually disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
So Seymour Cray should have traveled to the future, scooped up a pallet of Droid phones and then created a beowulf cluster?
He did (or will-have did, to use the correct temporal tense). Sadly, though, his actions violated causality, which caused the cosmos to smite him as he was driving along a local Interstate. It was a tragedy, and I'm glad the cosmos now follows (I mean, now/later will-follows) a "low-impact" policy, using intervention agents such as birds and baguettes.
I dunno... I'm going to be nicer to my Roomba, now that I know about his cousin in the Army.
Though, seriously, I do love my Roomba, even though I've only had him a week. (I think it's a girl, actually, but my son wanted a boy.) How many consumer products come with a note saying "This device has an interface which we encourage you to hack around on until it's no longer recognizable as a vacuum cleaner"?
The only problem is that he pulls to the right, and I don't know if that's by design or if he's got a problem. After a successful first run through three rooms, he keeps running out of power trying to find his way home. I've heard the iRobot folks are very helpful, though, so I'll probably give them a call. I'll just resist the urge to ask something like, "Shall we play a game?" -- and if offered a choice, I'll go for a nice game of chess, not Global Thermonuclear War.
When T-Mobile released the "T-Mobile Tap" -- manufactured by Huawei -- I bought it the first week. It was cheap, had a huge screen, and counted as a "dumbphone" so it wasn't subject to the smartphone data plan upcharge.
I've regretted that purchase every single day since.
I posted a litany of woes over on the HoFo forum. I have never had a phone that provided me with such daily reminders of why I don't buy new products.
The interface is clunky and inconsistent -- it's clear that one dev team built the dialer, another dev team built the text message system, and another one built the contacts. All of those reference things like typing and phone number entry, but they all do it in different ways! And, they all suck. In fact, none of the functions play well together. All of the built-in apps can be dragged onto the "desktop", but most of them go away every time you power-cycle.
And the hardware is cheap. Every time a sound plays (like a ringtone) on the external speaker, there's an audible "pop" as the speaker gets power and another "pop" when the sound completes and the speaker powers down. And the processor often bogs down during complex tasks, such as entering a phone number.:P Of course, it's a sub-$200 touchscreen, so I didn't expect top-notch hardware -- if that's all that sucked, I'd be happy.
The worst part is just cropping up now, though. Random software issues are killing the digitizer. I'm quite certain it's not hardware, because it typically happens after running a Java app (such as the built-in Google Maps, or the Opera Mini I downloaded but can barely use because the phone only gives it a data connection half the time). Also, strange behavior occurs when the digitizer is wonky, like when the text message notification bar goes away or the options at the bottom of the screen disappear and leave the background visible.
Maybe it's not just bad software... maybe these are indications that the Chinese government is monitoring my calls and text messages. Maybe I got on their bad side by using Google Voice? If that's the case, they're getting a whole lot of messages like "I'll have to call you back, my phone is crapping out again".
I learned one lesson, at least. If the manufacturer isn't willing to put their name on it, don't buy it! T-Mobile should follow that advice, instead of tarnishing their name by associating it with this piece of crap Tap.
I wonder, at what point does a feature that saves lives, limbs, or fingers go from "nice to have" to mandatory? Seat belts, for example -- once they were an option, now you have to have them and *use* them.
I often hear the ads for GM's OnStar, where someone is in a crash and the OnStar response saves their life or that of someone in the other car. They tout some large number of OnStar crash activations as a reason to buy a GM car. But if it's such a critical safety feature -- if nobody in their right mind would consider buying a vehicle *without* OnStar -- then shouldn't it be mandatory on *all* vehicles?
Where *do* we draw a line between "buy this to save your life, if you want to" and "buy this to save your life, you're required to"? I'm sure there's strong arguments on both sides... the issue of licensing patented maim-prevention systems is just part of the debate.
I'd wonder if they're still in business. People who are good at what they're doing tend to find jobs anywhere. People who're bad at what they're doing have to swallow whatever their boss subjects them to.
True, in general. But there's an interesting cautionary tale (by the guy who founded HowStuffWorks.com, oddly enough) that posits a corollary -- what if you were bad at doing something once, but an all-knowing never-forgetting system prevents you from *ever* putting it behind you?
As these communication networks between all the different Manna systems built up, things started to get uncomfortable for every worker. For example, the Manna software in each store knew about employee performance in microscopic detail -- how often the employee was on time or early, how quickly the employee did tasks, how quickly the employee answered the phone and responded to email, how the customers rated the employee and so on. When an employee left a store and tried to get a new job somewhere else, any other Manna system could request the employee's performance record. If an employee had "issues" -- late, slow, disorganized, unkempt -- it became nearly impossible for that employee to get another job. Nearly every company with minimum wage employees used Manna software or something similar, and performance records on employees were a major commodity freely exchanged between corporations. A marginal employee got blacklisted in the system very quickly.
Brain's dystopian vision (like most others) is full of glaring flaws -- he completely discounts the ability of people to drop "below the radar" -- but it's an interesting reference whenever another story comes out about how automation is making us "more productive".
You're the Klein Bottle Guy? That's got to be the best tongue-in-cheek site selling an actual product, in the history of ever.
Not surprisingly, you were too modest to plug your site, so I'll do it for you: Acme Klein Bottle.
Sample awesomeness, from the Conditions of Acme's Unconditional Guarantee:
We at Acme Klein Bottle strive to create the finest nonorientable surfaces and hope that you will be satisfied with your new Acme manifold. For this reason, we are pleased to offer this UNCONDITIONAL GUARANTEE complete with these conditions:
* We unconditionally guarantee your Acme Klein Bottle to be free of any defects in workmanship or workwomanship for a period of ONE YEAR following purchase. If you aren't satisfied with your Acme Klein Bottle -- for any reason -- just return it for a refund or replacement. You pick up shipping charges.
* We guarantee safe arrival. If your Klein Bottle arrives broken, call or send email and we will immediately send a replacement.
* We slightly guarantee your Klein Bottle for THREE MONTHS against any cracks or breakage, whether due to earthquakes, clumsy undergrads, or greasy fingers. Just mail us a fragment and $10, and we will send a replacement.
* We warrant each Acme Klein Bottle for a period of FIVE YEARS to be absolutely free of any magnetic monopoles. If you discover one, contact us immediately and we will refund your purchase price right after claiming the Nobel Prize.
* Furthermore, we guarantee for TEN YEARS that any polyhedron spanning your unbroken Acme Klein Bottle will have about as many edges as the sum of its vertices plus faces.
* We further warrant for ONE MILLION YEARS that within a Euclidean plane, the square of a right triangle's hypotenuse will equal the sum of the squares of the two remaining legs.
In addition, Acme's provides this exclusive LIFETIME GUARANTEE: We guarantee that you will live your entire lifetime, or double your money back.
Hmm, thinking about this way too much, and trying to remember things that I haven't had to do in a decade and a half.
I found a page (think it may have been on the local network) that would let me let me enter, say, "tonightshow.com" (he also had an online presence then). It would spit back something like 66.77.124.26. I would go to http://66.77.124.26/ and -- if I was lucky -- the site would appear. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.
And of course, if it did, it would be a bunch of plain text -- nothing like the multimedia experience you get now by going to http://tonightshow.com/ . Not even so much as a font specification. But it was still a huge step up from the StarText BBS.
Anyway, though... I got that IP address from "tonightshow.com" by using an online site that said "Forward DNS Lookup - Look up a domain name's IP". So I think I was wrong when I said "Reverse lookup", and the response was right.
Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
Oh, how I wish the network were still missing that "essential ingredient". On the page containing the 1995 lament, I now see ads for: * Hugh Downs' Artery Cleaning "Secret" (now with 50% more Nobel Prize Laureate!) * Acai Berry Exposed - Official Test * Drivers from Minnesota wanted! (of course, I'm in Dallas... with a MN proxy server) * Saint Paul - Mom Lost 46lbs Following 1 Rule (MN mislocalization again) * DON'T Pay for White Teeth (with the requisite sugar cube clenched in teeth, WTF?)
Meanwhile, *my* neighborhood mall -- the first air-conditioned mall west of the Mississippi -- is now a grass-covered field.
That said, I don't think I could go back to 1995, though it would be a fun challenge. The best part was doing DNS reverse lookups of domain names, since the company's network didn't have a DNS server. I could read David Letterman's Top Ten list the next morning, if I plugged the right octets into something called "Netscape" -- I thought I was livin' large.
I kinda suspected as much, given the difficult nature of hacking anything in the Xbox network. Since I've already decided not to get another Xbox anyway (for several geekish reasons, such as the modchip massacre of 2009), maybe I should get myself a computer from this decade so I can run Portal.
Gah, I went through the first 20 pages of the thread compulsively. I can only imagine how much productivity I'd lose if my Xbox hadn't been stolen last year and I could still play the game.
But here's what one poster came up with, from hacked sound files:
#1 - Dinosaur 1 (morse code) = Interior transmission active External data line active Message digest active
#2 - Dinosaur 5 (md5 hash) = 9e107d9d372bb6826bd81d3542a419d6 "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
#3 - Dinosaur 12 (morse code) = System data dump active User back up active Password back up active
#4 - Dinosaur 17 (morse code encoded as "beep" and "beeep") =.-.. ---.-.. "LOL"
Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. What's Slashdot doing looking at my junk, anyway? Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Come on Slashdot, don't involve me in your pro-choice vs. pro-life politics.
I'm sure someone will say it more seriously than you are, so let me just point out right away, the structures that the scientists are describing are fleeting, lasting for billionths of a second before breaking down and reforming with different water molecules. In short, even if the structure of these bonds could effect the body (and that's a big if), you'd have to deliver the water to the problem area within a billionth of a second for it to do anything.
Yeah, but aren't we dealing with a pseudo-science that claims that solutions in the parts-per-trillion range (or less) are effective in treating everything from hair loss to athlete's foot? Once you've made that jump of logic, saying it happens in 10e-9 seconds is no big leap.
The funniest (and saddest) commentary on homeopathic "medicine" is on the box itself. I've seen several overpriced cure-alls that tout the fact that they are safe for children because they have "no side effects". Of *course* they have no side effects. They don't have any front, back, top, or bottom effects, either!
My AP name is an obvious email address -- "access@(my domain name).net". If someone wants to access it, that's fine with me... but if they don't want it crashing intermittently, they should send me a note and we'll work out some sort of uptime agreement. This would involve helping pay for a more reliable router. It occasionally freezes, and the kids know that if they're having lag in Halo, they can just reboot the router to kick off anyone leeching too much bandwidth.
As it is, though, my unreliable router seems to have done a great job of increasing the number of people who now have their own networks instead of sponging off mine. (Sadly, they secured theirs, so I can't return the "favor" and save myself a few bucks a month.)
My only real concern is over having my IP address associated with unsavory activity. I figure one solution to that would be to set up a TOR server, and set up a transparent proxy to route all leech traffic to go through it. That would eliminate the liability issues, and might help with the bandwidth as well.
Wouldn't this only work on single person households where that single person twitters all day long?
That's a feature, not a bug. The person you described probably has a house full of expensive computer, networking, and video equipment. Plus, with just the one person, when they're gone, there's nobody else going to be dropping in. It's perfect... unless, of course, the tech-head is also a gun nut, and is only *pretending* to go out for a night on the town with some hot babe. As if. If the thief actually believes *that* post, he deserves what he gets.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure I'm not the only code monkey who shudders at the implications of this statement.
Some of us coders are well-nigh insufferable already, because they think they're Superprogrammer and can leap tall mainframes in a single bounds check. The problem comes when those types find themselves in management -- but won't let go of the programming reins. Now, the IT guy with a new idea doesn't just have to worry about it getting shot down by the hotshot who knows everything -- he has to worry about whether his *career* will get shot down by Mr. Hotshot Coder-Manager.
There's a great chance that the article poster isn't like that. But I'm worried, because Ask Slashdot isn't who he should be asking... he should be asking the coders he manages how to design and/or restructure the database. The fact that he's asking Slashdot tells me that he's not comfortable letting someone else do the work, possibly because he's Superprogrammer and always knows what's best.
But in case that's not the situation -- maybe he's in a company that simply grew faster than its staffing could handle -- I'll answer the question. He wants a good book to explain general database design techniques. My answer: buy a good book on management techniques, because *that* is your job. Let the people you manage come up with a database design, because that is *their* job.
You would prefer, then, that the article said "The well has pumped millions of gallons (3,785,411.78's of liters) of oil into the Gulf"? Perhaps a review of the concept of False Precision is in order. "A guard at a museum says a dinosaur skeleton is 70 million and six years old. He reasons that it was 70 million years old when he started working there six years ago."
This paragraph from TFA has the most salient information:
4% sure does seem significant. But more interesting is that the measurement is thought to be much more precise because of the method of measurement. Doesn't it seem more likely that it's just not possible to get an accurate measurement with the electron -- like measuring a grape with a yardstick instead of a micrometer?
And of course, there's that stupid cat-in-a-box thing... you can't measure something without affecting it, so maybe muons interact in some strange (lol) way with protons that doesn't happen (or happens differently) with electrons. But as a non-physicist, even throwing those terms out there puts me far outside my league.
Of course, these more prosaic explanations don't lead to nearly as many cool sci-fi plot threads. FTL drive powered by a process that squeezes protons to black hole density, perhaps? That would be awesome. Or, perhaps the expansion of the universe is actually reducing the size of subatomic particles -- so in a few billion years, all matter will simply wink out of existence. Or, there's a time dilation effect as well, so that time drags longer and longer, especially on Mondays.
I usually explain concrete vs. asphalt with a reverse-car analogy. Concrete is digital; asphalt is analog.
With a concrete surface, you have two states: good or bad. In the 1 (good) state, it's smooth and durable. In the 0 (bad) state, it crumbles away to nothing.
Asphalt, though, has many values: smooth and flat, a bit bumpy, kinda rutted, cracked, nearly-gravel, and "wasn't there a paved road here once?" The transition between states is gradual, unlike concrete where one day you're driving just fine, and after the ice storm your lug nuts are flying off.
Which surface is "better" depends on your perception. After all, we got rid of asphalt-like analog TV (some stations come in clearer than others) to concreteish digital TV (you either have a station or you don't), and called that "progress".
The submitter doesn't know what to do with his 802.11b networking equipment, and says it's outdated? What the hell should I do, then, with my closet full of 802.11a adapters?
Seriously -- I got some Intel equipment for $5 a piece, originally $300+, and used it to build my first wireless network. It was a real Frankenstein's Monster of a setup, too: a dialup connection, a Coyote Linux box, and this crazy grey box that was so inefficient, it had a cooling fan built in. The thing didn't even have any sort of basic wired router/switch capability. It sat on top of the fridge for a couple of years... until we went to move it and saw that the warmth had turned it into a magnet for roaches. You've heard of a Roach Motel? This was a high-rise Roach Health Spa. That particular 802.11a adapter went straight into the burn bin (plastic and all).
Sadly, though, I still had three more units. At $5 each, I'd bought four.
To answer my own question, though, of what to do with them... I dropped them off before business hours at a local PC repair shop last week, along with a half-dozen old PCs that the kids were tired of tripping over. I hope they'll be able to put them to good use. After all, who's going to be able to eavesdrop on an 802.11a wireless connection?
Worth it just for the shortened answering machine message. Say sayonara to the Long Winded Lady.
Also, I love the text messages with the (attempted) transcription of the incoming message. Even when it's mangled, it tells me whether my ex is calling to tell me something important, or if she's just going to tell me the latest gossip about people I'm not related to any more (her, for example).
And the failed transcriptions are sometimes hilarious. My son likes to call up and leave a message just to see what Google thinks he said. A recent example: "Hey Dad and I found Steakhouse on. So either holler okay, but in the day picking up in." For great justice!
The same thing can pretty much be said about the whole internet to be fair.
Can be? More like *has* been said, and *continues* to be said. It started with personal web pages -- my first Geocities page proclaimed "I love my wife and kids!", as though that were something unique in the world. But I also had a page of cool background wallpapers that I'd found, back when that was a novel concept... and a little outfit called Yahoo! found my "Wallpaper Heaven" page and suddenly it was getting hundreds of hits a day.
Blogs, too -- 90% useless, but the remaining 10% are either essential to my job in IT, or just interesting. Fortunately, Google does a pretty good job of figuring out which ones are worth reading, just by looking at who's linking to them.
I have to agree with the other posters... if Twitter is achieving anywhere near 20% signal-to-noise, it's a resounding success. And as the search tools mature, it'll only get better. Or, to misquote Douglas Adams, it coul eventually disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
So Seymour Cray should have traveled to the future, scooped up a pallet of Droid phones and then created a beowulf cluster?
He did (or will-have did, to use the correct temporal tense). Sadly, though, his actions violated causality, which caused the cosmos to smite him as he was driving along a local Interstate. It was a tragedy, and I'm glad the cosmos now follows (I mean, now/later will-follows) a "low-impact" policy, using intervention agents such as birds and baguettes.
I dunno... I'm going to be nicer to my Roomba, now that I know about his cousin in the Army.
Though, seriously, I do love my Roomba, even though I've only had him a week. (I think it's a girl, actually, but my son wanted a boy.) How many consumer products come with a note saying "This device has an interface which we encourage you to hack around on until it's no longer recognizable as a vacuum cleaner"?
The only problem is that he pulls to the right, and I don't know if that's by design or if he's got a problem. After a successful first run through three rooms, he keeps running out of power trying to find his way home. I've heard the iRobot folks are very helpful, though, so I'll probably give them a call. I'll just resist the urge to ask something like, "Shall we play a game?" -- and if offered a choice, I'll go for a nice game of chess, not Global Thermonuclear War.
When T-Mobile released the "T-Mobile Tap" -- manufactured by Huawei -- I bought it the first week. It was cheap, had a huge screen, and counted as a "dumbphone" so it wasn't subject to the smartphone data plan upcharge.
I've regretted that purchase every single day since.
I posted a litany of woes over on the HoFo forum. I have never had a phone that provided me with such daily reminders of why I don't buy new products.
The interface is clunky and inconsistent -- it's clear that one dev team built the dialer, another dev team built the text message system, and another one built the contacts. All of those reference things like typing and phone number entry, but they all do it in different ways! And, they all suck. In fact, none of the functions play well together. All of the built-in apps can be dragged onto the "desktop", but most of them go away every time you power-cycle.
And the hardware is cheap. Every time a sound plays (like a ringtone) on the external speaker, there's an audible "pop" as the speaker gets power and another "pop" when the sound completes and the speaker powers down. And the processor often bogs down during complex tasks, such as entering a phone number. :P Of course, it's a sub-$200 touchscreen, so I didn't expect top-notch hardware -- if that's all that sucked, I'd be happy.
The worst part is just cropping up now, though. Random software issues are killing the digitizer. I'm quite certain it's not hardware, because it typically happens after running a Java app (such as the built-in Google Maps, or the Opera Mini I downloaded but can barely use because the phone only gives it a data connection half the time). Also, strange behavior occurs when the digitizer is wonky, like when the text message notification bar goes away or the options at the bottom of the screen disappear and leave the background visible.
Maybe it's not just bad software... maybe these are indications that the Chinese government is monitoring my calls and text messages. Maybe I got on their bad side by using Google Voice? If that's the case, they're getting a whole lot of messages like "I'll have to call you back, my phone is crapping out again".
I learned one lesson, at least. If the manufacturer isn't willing to put their name on it, don't buy it! T-Mobile should follow that advice, instead of tarnishing their name by associating it with this piece of crap Tap.
Finish this sentence: "And one time, at fire-making camp, I..."
I wonder, at what point does a feature that saves lives, limbs, or fingers go from "nice to have" to mandatory? Seat belts, for example -- once they were an option, now you have to have them and *use* them.
I often hear the ads for GM's OnStar, where someone is in a crash and the OnStar response saves their life or that of someone in the other car. They tout some large number of OnStar crash activations as a reason to buy a GM car. But if it's such a critical safety feature -- if nobody in their right mind would consider buying a vehicle *without* OnStar -- then shouldn't it be mandatory on *all* vehicles?
Where *do* we draw a line between "buy this to save your life, if you want to" and "buy this to save your life, you're required to"? I'm sure there's strong arguments on both sides... the issue of licensing patented maim-prevention systems is just part of the debate.
Yep, wrapped up like a douche. You know, the odor in the night.
Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun.
(But Mama, that's where the fun is!)
I'd wonder if they're still in business. People who are good at what they're doing tend to find jobs anywhere. People who're bad at what they're doing have to swallow whatever their boss subjects them to.
True, in general. But there's an interesting cautionary tale (by the guy who founded HowStuffWorks.com, oddly enough) that posits a corollary -- what if you were bad at doing something once, but an all-knowing never-forgetting system prevents you from *ever* putting it behind you?
- from Manna, by Marshall Brain
Brain's dystopian vision (like most others) is full of glaring flaws -- he completely discounts the ability of people to drop "below the radar" -- but it's an interesting reference whenever another story comes out about how automation is making us "more productive".
You're the Klein Bottle Guy? That's got to be the best tongue-in-cheek site selling an actual product, in the history of ever.
Not surprisingly, you were too modest to plug your site, so I'll do it for you: Acme Klein Bottle.
Sample awesomeness, from the Conditions of Acme's Unconditional Guarantee:
Hmm, thinking about this way too much, and trying to remember things that I haven't had to do in a decade and a half.
I found a page (think it may have been on the local network) that would let me let me enter, say, "tonightshow.com" (he also had an online presence then). It would spit back something like 66.77.124.26. I would go to http://66.77.124.26/ and -- if I was lucky -- the site would appear. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.
And of course, if it did, it would be a bunch of plain text -- nothing like the multimedia experience you get now by going to http://tonightshow.com/ . Not even so much as a font specification. But it was still a huge step up from the StarText BBS.
Anyway, though... I got that IP address from "tonightshow.com" by using an online site that said "Forward DNS Lookup - Look up a domain name's IP". So I think I was wrong when I said "Reverse lookup", and the response was right.
Isn't that a forward lookup?
I think you're right! It's been a while, so I couldn't remember. Reverse lookup is what I do *now*, to see where my spam comes from. Cool, thanks.
From TF95A:
Oh, how I wish the network were still missing that "essential ingredient". On the page containing the 1995 lament, I now see ads for:
* Hugh Downs' Artery Cleaning "Secret" (now with 50% more Nobel Prize Laureate!)
* Acai Berry Exposed - Official Test
* Drivers from Minnesota wanted! (of course, I'm in Dallas... with a MN proxy server)
* Saint Paul - Mom Lost 46lbs Following 1 Rule (MN mislocalization again)
* DON'T Pay for White Teeth (with the requisite sugar cube clenched in teeth, WTF?)
Meanwhile, *my* neighborhood mall -- the first air-conditioned mall west of the Mississippi -- is now a grass-covered field.
That said, I don't think I could go back to 1995, though it would be a fun challenge. The best part was doing DNS reverse lookups of domain names, since the company's network didn't have a DNS server. I could read David Letterman's Top Ten list the next morning, if I plugged the right octets into something called "Netscape" -- I thought I was livin' large.
I kinda suspected as much, given the difficult nature of hacking anything in the Xbox network. Since I've already decided not to get another Xbox anyway (for several geekish reasons, such as the modchip massacre of 2009), maybe I should get myself a computer from this decade so I can run Portal.
Gah, I went through the first 20 pages of the thread compulsively. I can only imagine how much productivity I'd lose if my Xbox hadn't been stolen last year and I could still play the game.
But here's what one poster came up with, from hacked sound files:
#1 - Dinosaur 1 (morse code)
=
Interior transmission active
External data line active
Message digest active
#2 - Dinosaur 5 (md5 hash)
=
9e107d9d372bb6826bd81d3542a419d6
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
#3 - Dinosaur 12 (morse code)
=
System data dump active
User back up active
Password back up active
#4 - Dinosaur 17 (morse code encoded as "beep" and "beeep") .-.. --- .-..
=
"LOL"
Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. What's Slashdot doing looking at my junk, anyway?
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Come on Slashdot, don't involve me in your pro-choice vs. pro-life politics.
I'm sure someone will say it more seriously than you are, so let me just point out right away, the structures that the scientists are describing are fleeting, lasting for billionths of a second before breaking down and reforming with different water molecules. In short, even if the structure of these bonds could effect the body (and that's a big if), you'd have to deliver the water to the problem area within a billionth of a second for it to do anything.
Yeah, but aren't we dealing with a pseudo-science that claims that solutions in the parts-per-trillion range (or less) are effective in treating everything from hair loss to athlete's foot? Once you've made that jump of logic, saying it happens in 10e-9 seconds is no big leap.
The funniest (and saddest) commentary on homeopathic "medicine" is on the box itself. I've seen several overpriced cure-alls that tout the fact that they are safe for children because they have "no side effects". Of *course* they have no side effects. They don't have any front, back, top, or bottom effects, either!
My AP name is an obvious email address -- "access@(my domain name).net". If someone wants to access it, that's fine with me... but if they don't want it crashing intermittently, they should send me a note and we'll work out some sort of uptime agreement. This would involve helping pay for a more reliable router. It occasionally freezes, and the kids know that if they're having lag in Halo, they can just reboot the router to kick off anyone leeching too much bandwidth.
As it is, though, my unreliable router seems to have done a great job of increasing the number of people who now have their own networks instead of sponging off mine. (Sadly, they secured theirs, so I can't return the "favor" and save myself a few bucks a month.)
My only real concern is over having my IP address associated with unsavory activity. I figure one solution to that would be to set up a TOR server, and set up a transparent proxy to route all leech traffic to go through it. That would eliminate the liability issues, and might help with the bandwidth as well.
Wouldn't this only work on single person households where that single person twitters all day long?
That's a feature, not a bug. The person you described probably has a house full of expensive computer, networking, and video equipment. Plus, with just the one person, when they're gone, there's nobody else going to be dropping in. It's perfect... unless, of course, the tech-head is also a gun nut, and is only *pretending* to go out for a night on the town with some hot babe. As if. If the thief actually believes *that* post, he deserves what he gets.
For sale: One Death Star. Full size. Somewhat lumpy. Amateur construction. Needs work.
That's just an early engineering prototype. The production model came out looking much better.